Key Governance Considerations in a SharePoint Deployment

Having been involved in a number of deployments, there are some key things to consider.  Here are some of my key deployment considerations to governance & management.

• Quota - to encourage storage management, if not manage your disk space and search relevancy
• Usage Policies - what is ok, SharePoint Designer, Custom web parts, SQL data sources in dataviews, what types of sites do you provision, who can own a site?
• Data/Site Retention policies - How long does data that isn't accessed or categorized or even used for a couple of years stick around?
• Web Part/Development policies - Ownership, support, deployment?
• Meta Data Capture & Content Types - How can you get the best data out of your users?
• Managed Approach to deployment (top down) - What is our enterprise search story, what is our browse, site map and site directory story... What do the departments in my company use for aggregation?
• Self Service approach to deployment (bottoms up) - how can I keep Help desk from being a bottleneck to information worker productivity
• Montoring Plan - Is there a 24/7 plan with a MOM console?  What application packs or web services verifications and synthetic transactions for verifiying uptime.
• Global Considerations - Shared Services, WAN and end user performance levels, enteprise search considerations
• Cost Model or Charge Back Model for recapture of IT Costs - who pays for all this?
• Solutions Deployment packaging best practices and rules to live by - How can we consistently deploy web parts, site definition changes
• Branding - how can we consistently have a good experience for our end users and keep the sense of company ownership
• Stakeholder and ownership - who should be involved in these decisions
• SSP Delegation models - Who owns Search and relevancy (best bets), who owns the profiles (company directory), who owns the BDC (business data catalog) connections to our SAP, who get's safe locations for Excel published charts, spreadsheets
• Operational & Service SLAs -
  • Backup and Restore/Recovery & Business Continuance SLAs
  • Uptime
  • Downtime windows
  • Performance SLAs
• Communications plan - who do we communicate to, when and how often and what?  Is there a Communications website where we communicate this list of info?
• End User Education Plan - Is there an FAQ, training materials, brown bags, web sites?

I recommend going through this list, and adding more of your own, then building a governance worksheet or "Green book" that helps bring the stakeholders together.  See attached for an outline to get you started.

<Update>

I did a presentation at TechReady4 on governance (look for it at TechEd 2007 in Orlando) with Christian Buckley.  He did a post on some of the recommendations... Good summary...

Governance tools at http://www.codeplex.com/governance

</update>